00:00What is this marshmallow test? Well, when you look at children and you look at all the different
00:05theories about what makes successful kids, you realize that almost all the theories are wrong
00:09because they haven't been verified. Like, for example, high IQ. You have a lot of high IQ people
00:14who become marginal members of society. And so what is the one psychological test that correlates
00:20with success in life? And I found out that it's the marshmallow test. You get kids and ask them,
00:26do you want a marshmallow now or two marshmallows a few hours from now? And the kids that want the
00:33marshmallow now tend to be those that want shortcuts. Those that don't want to do the hard
00:38work. They want the quick kill. They grab that marshmallow. But the other ones say, now, wait a
00:44minute. If I wait two hours, I can get two marshmallows. I can hold out. There's a pot of gold
00:50waiting
00:51for me. They're not going to take the shortcut. And so you say to yourself, well, that's a test
00:55for kids. But then you track them decade by decade by decade. And you find that they are
01:01more successful. They have a lower divorce rate, higher income, higher status in society
01:06that don't want that simple payoff now, but are going to delay gratification into the future.
01:13And so I realized that that's the key to success in life, not just science, but in life. Don't
01:19take the shortcuts. But can it be taught? Well, part of it is your personality that is formed
01:24when you're very young. Okay. Let's be very clear about that. But I think that, yes, I
01:29think that, for example, it turns out that if you do the same thing with poor children
01:33and the same thing with middle class children, it turns out that poor children will, in general,
01:38go for the quick kill because they know that things disappear real fast. If there's money
01:43in the house, it's gone in the future. If you can show people that there is a pot of gold
01:48out there, that, yes, you hold out, you go to college, you'll learn the discipline. There's
01:52a pot of gold out there. You can learn to appreciate that fact. What we have in the brain that
01:58is
01:58different from animals is we understand time. We understand the future. My grandparents came
02:06to California a hundred years ago. But imagine back then life expectancy was 49 years of age.
02:13I mean, you were born, you had kids and died. Life was a bitch.
02:20Now we have an increased lifespan. We have all the luxury goods. Instead of yelling out the window,
02:25which is what my grandparents did to communicate, we have the internet. And so when you look at it
02:31the long term, decade for decade, you realize the enormous progress that we've made. We constantly
02:36daydream. We scheme. We plot. We constantly think about what could be. Now let's do an experiment.
02:43Go home tonight and teach your dog the concept of tomorrow. Try it. Teach your dog
02:51the concept of tomorrow, the next week, the next year. And you realize you can't. Animals live
02:58in the present. And that's what I think intelligence is. Intelligence is being able to map the future,
03:04simulate the future. So if you get an experiment, people with low IQ and high IQ, put them in the
03:11same room, and you give them the same job, rob a bank. You'll find out that the low IQ people
03:17probably do a much better job of robbing a bank, plotting the bank robbery, than high IQ people
03:22who get all messed up with legal implications and stuff like that. The point is that you can
03:27have some very smart robbers because they see the future. And that's what we humans do that animals
03:33cannot. We constantly daydream. We constantly create worlds that don't exist. And to me, that's
03:40what intelligence is. Some people ask me, well, what is the meaning of life then? And I say
03:44to myself that if somebody gives you from up high the meaning of life, it's too easy.
03:51I mean, is that all? My attitude is that it's self-discovery. We have to reinvent ourselves,
03:58that we have to recreate ourselves, that the meaning of life is rediscovery.
04:03I mean, is that it's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's
04:21self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery.
04:22It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self
04:22-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's self-discovery. It's
04:25self-discovery.
